I started using grocery self-checkouts during COVID, but I’ve kept using them because there’s rarely a line (and I’m a misanthrope). I’d probably go back to using regular human checkouts if I had to dig through all my crap to prove what I bought.
Having said that, I’ve noticed myself making mistakes. I’ve accidentally failed to scan an item, and I’ve accidentally entered incorrect codes for produce. When I notice, I fix them, but I’ve probably missed a few.
I guess the easiest answer is for grocery chains to reinvest some of those windfall profits and hire more cashiers.
Ha! Not that I steal, but I don’t care about supermarkets losing money from people stealing.
If they want their customers to know how to use the self-checkout machines better, they ought to pay them for training.
Also sometimes the machines a super finicky. It hasn’t happened very recently for me, but the amount of times you need an employee to reset the machine or enter a code is too damn high.
I steal, it’s very convenient. Great way to save no groceries.
Ya anyone with an ounce of brain cells predicted that theft would be an issue with self-checkputs but stores were blindsided by the savings they saw with getting rid of cashiers.
Always making a big deal out of theft for pennies or dollars from individual customers … but seldom highlighting the theft of thousands and millions by corporate heads at the top
Unless there’s a barrier to entry (like a membership at Costco), they can’t force you to show your receipt or check your items.
You’re kinda wrong.
Even Costco can’t “force” you. What they can do is ban you, which any store can do. It’s harder to enforce without someone at the door checking, but totally possible.
It’s actually in the membership agreement. If you refuse to show, they can ban you. However, the fact you would have a Costco membership indicates that you signed an agreement that allows them to have you show the receipt.
In my experiences, it has always been something flagged by the receipt checker at Costco confirming that I got something I paid for and had to collect for the secure area, or provided to me at check out like movie tickets.
Yes, but what I’m saying is that any store can ban you for any reason (that isn’t legally protected)
So it has nothing to do with Costco specifically
It’s all good. The moment they demand my papers we go talk about it at the return counter anyway. They can double-secret-ban me if it’ll make them happy, but they can’t fire me as a customer if I’ve already quit.
All I can do is act with ethics and integrity. The rest is their god-damned problem. I can’t say I have ever been harassed at the door though. Maybe this was just one security guard going overboard.
Corporations want it both ways …
… docile workers that will work for little or no pay, which make them poor and more apt to want to steal in order to get cheap food
… honest customers that won’t steal, even if they become desperate because corporations refused to pay them a living wage to afford food
Economically speaking … it’s a no brainer … pay people a living wage and pay for more cashiers to work at the front … the company makes more money by securing purchases and keeping everyone honest and you maintain a workforce of highly paid people who go to spend their money with your stores anyway
Instead, we want to maintain a system where money and wealth continually keep getting shoved to ever smaller groups of people and we wonder why those of us at the bottom keep trying steal and rob the system just to get by.
‘If you give a man gun he can rob a bank; if you give man a bank he can rob the world.’
I get the whole living wage thing, but a cashier’s position was never a living wage, in the past it was a wage used to supplement a family’s income, or to pay for post secondary tuition. What changed? My local Wallyworld supercentre was the first in the region to go self serve, the manager said he couldn’t find staff, but in all honesty whether it was a living wage or not, I think he just didn’t want the staff.
The minimum wage was enacted to provide all citizens with a basic quality of life, including food and housing. Full stop. Everything after your incorrect statement is irrelevant as it is founded on an untrue principle.
My bad. I never knew a 16 year old working at a fast food outlet was supposed to support a family. I formally apologize as a white colonial male with priviledge
This is the same logic my old man has. I like to ask him if his breakfast is being made by a 16 year old on a school day.
You say that as if the majority of minimum-wage earners aren’t, and haven’t always been, adults. Go read a book.
They don’t read. It hurts their brain to try
sTuDeNts sHoUlD wOrK tHroUgh cOlLeGe tO cOmE oUt dEbT fReE
Also
sTuDeNts sHoUld mAkE sLavE wAgEs cAUse tHeyRe yOunG.
Did you know McDonald’s workers in Denmark make over 20 an hour AND the food is cheaper than in the states?
A friend of mine, her father was a bagging clerk at a grocery store for literally his entire life. He was able to support two kids and a spouse on that salary, and retired maybe ten years ago.
How far in the past? I’m sure I remember unionized cashiers at, I think, Safeway getting paid comparable to me as a unionized welder in the late 1970s or early 1980s. I could be completely wrong about that, because I think it was the whole store on strike, not just the cashiers.
A couple of my aunts were cashiers around the same timeframe, one of em a single mom. I don’t know how much they were paid, but they had decent apartments in Toronto around Roncesvalles with enough square footage for a kid and his cousins to get “up to speed” (I mostly recall the injuries)
That lines up with my memories in Saskatoon. Injuries aside :) By then I had my own son to manage!
It’s not the job of corporations to treat people well, they’re an entity designed to maximize profit within the framework they operate in.
A democratic government is designed to represent the will of the citizens. If we aren’t happy with the way corporations treat us, then we should vote in a government that will regulate corporations to force them to treat us well.
The goal should be jobs that are boring to humans being automated completely AND not having theft because people don’t need to do it in order to have a good life.
It get harder and harder for government to regulate corporations as they get bigger and bigger and are multinationals. That’s what happens with tax heavens.
I understand corporations motives, but the parent commenter explains well that it doesn’t work well if they are too greedy about it.
When do you do when your choice in voting is carefully handpicked insiders from a group that has insulated themselves from outside forces over the past 50 odd years and the only choices with a real chance of winning are not going to work in their constituents best interest?
When do you do when your choice in voting is …
The answer’s the same
- Pick the least bad
- Repeat
And also
A. Fight for better voting so that minority candidates with good ideas get the nod they need.
Picking the last bad is why we are slipping AS A WHOLE in the wrong direction.
Well let’s stick with the second-worst as long as it keeps the absolute worst out and their bootstraps bullshit and the dissolution of services that keep us from being Americans. They have even more work to do down south than we do, and I’d like those fools from Edmonton NOT to make us imitate that idiocy wholesale.
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No we’re not. Go look at some numbers.
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If your campaigning some ‘bootstraps’ idiocy, it’s easier than changing us into America and their Medical Bankruptcy if you just move there for a few years. Put the fear of the aristocracy in you.
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You join those parties and start voting at membership conventions.
That’s where actual policies get set.
What I do is deliberately go to a cashier, even if the line is extremely long, and I see more and more people doing the same. This forces more lines to open. One time they asked if I could use the self-checkout to speed up the process. I replied that if the items were cheaper at the self-checkout, sure, otherwise I’d stay in line.
This forces more lines to open.
Does it really, though? I have yet to see a rollback on self-checkouts.
I noticed this at my local Loblaws. At first they only had one to two lines open and they were extremely long. Now they have several lines open and it’s very fluid.
Oh, nice. I guess hope is not lost!
I do the same thing. Aside from a gas pump, I no longer will use self-checkout for any reason. I’m done working for Big Retail for no pay & no discount.
Having said that, I’ve noticed myself making mistakes. I’ve accidentally failed to scan an item, and I’ve accidentally entered incorrect codes for produce. When I notice, I fix them, but I’ve probably missed a few.
Stores are 1000 percent alright with this. They don’t want you to intentionally steal of course, but shit happens and people mess up, even trained cashiers.
The real problem occurs when people intentionally and maliciously steal, and these checks arent there to catch people like you.
I feel like Galen Weston (or whoever his replacement is) just wants to suck every penny out of me and doesn’t care why I screw up. He. Just. Wants. My. Money.
I’ve never seen anyone stealing food and neither did you…
I know it varies by location, but I have been using self checkout for years.
There are always more self checkouts open than there ever where staffed lines. I don’t get in the line that has someone argue over checks or coupons, when a spot opens up the next person gets to start. If I only have a few things I don’t need to spend 25 to 20 minutes in line like I did before self checkout.
Other than a couple years of growing pains, self checkout has been a massive improvement for my general shopping experience. The fact that so many trips are for a few items probably impacts that, but even when picking up a week’s groceries I prefer self checkout.
You don’t legally have to stop and show your receipt (except Costco). I have a friend that pont blank tells them “nah” every time. Catch is, security can legally detain you if they really suspect something.
For me it’s not worth the hassle and I just show them with an annoying look.Catch is, security can legally detain you if they really suspect something. For me it’s not worth the hassle and I just show them with an annoying look.
Eh. The security minion is doing their job. If I get roped into a search I’m not gonna take it out on them.
I never use the self-checkouts. That’s bullshit. I don’t work there.
I don’t blame anyone that takes advantage of the system that corporations are building.
I will happily use self checkouts if it gets me out of the store faster/ lets me interact with the least amount of people possible. I work retail, I need that energy for my job.
The payment is your time. I use whichever checkout will get me out of the store faster.
100%. Life is too short to spend it standing in line.
I feel the same way, but sometimes I show up and the lines for actual cashiers is so long and there’s no one at self checkout. I can wait for ten minutes or I can scan my twizzlers and gtfo.
Am I the only one that hands my stuff to the staff member standing there and asks them for help? I really don’t mind saying I don’t understand how those things work, as I truly don’t care enough to pay even the slightest bit of attention to them… If there’s a staff member just standing there watching, why can’t they help me as a customer?
I’m always polite about it, except that one time at Dollarama where there was 4 people standing there acting like I was being rude for asking them to ring me thru a till rather than use a self checkout. That time, I just put my stuff down and walked out. If they don’t want to help me, I’m not giving them my money.
AND LET THE CASHIERS FUCKING SIT FOR FUCK SAKE!
It does make it much easier to steal, it’s very convenient.
The design is very human
Shift the cashier’s work to the customer and then bitch because the customer is bad at that job that they’re not trained for?
How could they be bigger assholes? Get fucked, corporate assholes!
Peach!
Edit: that was supposed to say “preach” but autocorrect ducked me. Leaving the way it is because that’s better.
Autocorrect can be a real motherducker.
Apple!
I thought we only buy bananas
4077
Or bananaducks
I prefer duckanas
Item not scanning … please scan item again
Peaches are code 4011, right?
I prefer self-checkout because cashiers don’t know shit about bagging groceries in a reasonable manner. I don’t like dealing with people and I like my groceries bagged to my specifications. Self-checkout is a godsend.
That said…
I have made mistakes. I’ve accidently stolen from WalMart. I’ve been an employee of WalMart; I am not crying over this. WalMart is a shit employer and they have a ton of self-check so they can continue to refuse full time jobs to cashiers so they don’t have to pay benefits. Fuck them.
I never have a problem bagging my own groceries at the cashier. It’s the best of both worlds: highly skilled checkout operator and a fairly skilled bagger.
I think the dedicated baggers they used to have were better at it than I am, though. They somehow managed to Tetris everything into appropriate bags that were of similar weight and were almost as stable as using a box.
I think the throughput of a cashier and a skilled bagger is much better than a bagging cashier and definitely better than self-checkouts.
I haaaaaaaate packing my own bags. But it beats dealing with people.
Having said that, it’s bullshit that I’m doing unpaid labour for the grocery chains. I should get a discount on my bill.
I agree. Self-check should come with a discount of some kind. For a lot of people it will absolutely feel/be unpaid labor. For me it’s a way to keep control over things and I am willing for that to be the case, but a lot of people are getting shoved into self-check due to lack of paid employees and cutbacks on cashier hours. It’s ridiculous.
I like my groceries bagged to my specifications.
This is 100% the reason I use self checkout. I really can’t stand my groceries being bagged in a way that essentially guarantees that something is going to be smashed, ripped, or spilled. Or that the paper bag is going to rip itself to shreds as I try to carry it in.
I most recently had a guy shove way more heavy shit into a paper bag than was even remotely reasonable and then tell me, “you gotta grab it from the bottom, the handles always rip off.” And I’m just standing there thinking to myself that I almost never have handles rip off the bags when I bag it myself. Which means that this guy is consistently overloading the bags every single time, causing the handles to rip off.
I don’t particularly mind if you’re going to stuff the bag full, but double bag it for fuck’s sake. You’re making minimum wage or near to it - you’re not getting a goddamn bonus if you use fewer bags to help the store’s bottom line.
We have reusable nylon bags and those are nice and sturdy. My local grocer… I line up my groceries on the belt in little piles and put one bag with each pile. I would think the point was obvious. They grab the bags and just throw whatever they want into each bag. raw meats mixed with boxed goods. heavy items on my eggs. I dislike going to my local grocer because there’s no self-check option. I was a cashier for a while and got a lot of compliments and praise from my customers because I bagged smartly. It’s not that hard to say “oh this is a freezer item, maybe I should put it with other freezer items”.
Never had an issue here, but even in the regular checkout they haven’t done bagging for years. It just goes down the belt and you still have/get to bag it yourself
